Mulatto

Mulatto (also Mulato) is a term of Spanish and/or Portuguese origin describing the offspring of African and European ancestry. The forms "mulatto/mulato" are widely used in Spanish and Portuguese. Many Americans of Hispanic and/or Latino origin identify themselves as mulatto; the term is also used in many other countries.

United States and Puerto Rico

In the USA, one criticism made in the use of "mulatto" is that it is said to ignore the high rate of racial intermixing in North America, in which few people have African ancestry without some small traces of European ancestry.

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While the criticism is a valid one, it fails to take into account that in the USA the historic Anglo-American tradition of the One-Drop Rule (the custom of deeming all people with any amount of African blood to be black) prevented mulattos from becoming an independent ethnic entity, with members seeing themselves as such. The existing mulatto communities in Charlston, Richmond, New Orleans and elsewhere were torn apart by the one-drop-rule. As a result of this, most US mulattos mixed with the African population, and while they did endow many modern African-Americans with the European ancestry mulattos possessed, that ancestry is now quite diluted. This in turn conflicts with the fact that the term mulatto usually refers to people with significant amounts of both European and African ancestry.

Related Topics:
Anglo-American - One-Drop Rule

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Mulattos might also constitute a significant portion of the population of Puerto Rico2, a commonwealth territory in association with the USA. However, recent genetic research indicates that, in relation to matrilineal ancestry as revealed by mtDNA, 61% have inherited mitochondrial DNA from an Amerind female ancestor, 27% have inherited mitochondrial DNA from a female African ancestor and 12% showed to have inherited mitochondrial DNA from a female European ancestor. Conversely, patrilineal input as indicated by the Y chromosome, showed that 70% of all Puerto Rican males have inherited Y chromasome DNA from a male European ancestor, 20% have inherited Y chromasome DNA from a male African ancestor and less than 10% have inherited Y chromasome DNA from male Amerindian ancestor. Because these test measure only the DNA along the matrilineal line and patrilinel lines of inheritance, each test only measures the one individual out of thousands, perhaps millions of ancestors; they cannot tell us exactly what percentage of Puerto Ricans have African Ancestry.

Related Topics:
Puerto Rico - 2 - MtDNA - Y chromosome

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Nevertheless, independent of their actual numbers, the history of the population of Puerto Rican mulattos is independent from those of the US mainland. Prior to the Spanish-American War - when Puerto Rico became a commonwealth of the United States - Puerto Rico was an integral part of the Spanish Empire, and it still constitutes a cultural-geographic segment of Latin America, thus their history is a shared one with those from Hispanic America and Brazil.

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